


Switch

by Nope



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-17
Updated: 2008-02-17
Packaged: 2018-11-02 23:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10954545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/pseuds/Nope
Summary: Three kids on a parallel Earth.





	Switch

"Right," said Mickey. He tried it again, with more force: "Right."

The other two waited. The lab clock ticked. It was very loud. Mickey hadn't noticed that before. Not that he'd spent much time in Torchwood Three before the start of the vortex manipulator project, but you'd think you'd notice a big tick tick tick ticking clock. The other two were still staring at him.

"Right," he said again. "Okay. ...um."

"Fat lot of good you are," Owen sneered, flumping down onto a handy seat.

"This is not the time for recriminations," Tosh said, arms tightly, nervously folded.

"We're four foot tall," Owen pointed out, waving a hand at them. "I'm a midget. I think this is a very good time for recriminations, thanks."

"You're a child, not a midget--"

"Oh, thanks!"

"I meant physically." Tosh considered this. "No, I was right the first time. You're a child."

"'This is not the time for recriminations'," Owen snidely mimicked.

"Right," said Mickey again.

"Will you stop saying that!"

"Look," Mickey said instead. "We're Torchwood. Don't we have experts in this sort of thing?"

"We are the experts," Tosh admitted.

"So we're a bit fucked, basically," Owen added. "Not to put too fine a point on it."

"Or we've just added twenty years to our life-spans," Tosh suggested hopefully. The men -- the boys, rather, both stared at her. "I'll check the computers again."

"We need to. I don't know. Start from beginning," Mickey said.

"Give the thing another whack, we might get to be zygotes again."

"Give it a rest, Owen. I'm in charge here, okay?" It would probably have been more authoritative if his voice hadn't cracked in the middle of it. "Oh, god, we're going to have to go through puberty again. Secretive, uncoordinated, and constantly thinking about sex."

"Not much different from usual then," said Tosh, not quite quietly enough. Owen pulled a face at Tosh's back.

Mickey ignored the comment in favour of saying, "It was some sort of, like, time-slip."

"Massive cell regeneration," Owen suggested.

"Our clothes changed too," Mickey pointed out, "and our hair is styled, not just grown or un-grown. I mean, look. Pigtails. That's not natural."

They all considered the pigtails.

"I've often said that," Owen agreed.

"We haven't just been rewound in time either," Tosh said. "We still remember everything." She considered. "I remember reading something about Einstein-Rosen bridges in relation to M-Theory and Grigori's postulate of transtemporal eigenvectors -- poly-dimensional invariants in the space-time superstructure that would account for certain psychic phenomena, especially morphological memory --"

"You lost me," Mickey said.

"Where?"

"Around 'reading'," Owen suggested. Mickey reached out without looking and smacked the back of Owen's head. "Owwww!"

"Stop whining, shortie."

"A vortex-manipulator," Tosh cut in loudly before Owen could start up, "is basically a quantum de-coherence engine." They both looked blank. "Okay, you know Schroedinger, right?"

"The cat in the box thing," Mickey said. "Both dead and alive at the same time. Horribly thing to do to animal. I don't agree with all that animal research bollocks."

"Uh... huh. Well, observation -- looking in the box -- collapses the waveform -- it makes the cat dead, or alive. The manipulator works in the other direction -- it takes your fixed position in space-time and makes it uncertain until re-actualised. Now, opening the box doesn't particularly change the observer -- okay, you learn something, but the cat, the observed makes the big change. Are you still with me?"

"I stopped listening when it looked like you weren't going to get to a point any time soon," said Owen, leaning back in the chair so Mickey couldn't reach.

"My point is, I think our bodies jumped quantum states--"

"Like being swapped for our parallel universe doubles!" Mickey said.

"Exactly. But our minds -- our psyches -- observed the process, so they weren't changed."

"Right," Mickey nodded. "So...?"

"So we give the thing another whack," Owen said.

"Essentially," Tosh admitted.

"And we all end up as zygotes. I could have sworn I already said this."

"We just have to see ourselves properly, though, right? That's what you're saying?" Mickey asked. Tosh nodded. "So that's easy, isn't it? We look at ourselves all the time. Especially you."

"Oi!" Owen complained.

"It would be better if we had a picture to look at it," Tosh put in to forestall the argument.

Mickey sat down at the middle computer, Owen and Tosh on either side, tapping at the keyboard. "CCTV footage. Who knew filming everything we did actually had a use beyond recording all the sex?" He frowned. "Did I say that last bit out loud?"

"No," Owen and Tosh quickly chorused.

"There we are. Okay, I'll put this up on your screens. Tosh, you do whatever you have to to the manipulator. Owen, you sit there and try not to fuck anything up."

"I've saved the entire planet at least five times," Owen said, "while you almost got us all fried by breaking the space-time barriers in order to make a booty call to your transdimensional girlfriend, so, with all due respect, boss, bite me."

"It was not a booty call! I was hunting Cyberman!"

"In her pants?"

"Guys!" Tosh yelled, then ducked her head, embarrassed. "Focus? Please?"

"Sorry, Tosh," Owen said.

"Yeah, sorry."

"Everybody look at their screens," Tosh ordered. "I'm triggering the manipulator. Concentrate on what we all looked like. Three. Two--"

The now familiar wash of turbulent energy rushed around. Mickey forced himself to stare at the screen and not at the way he was flickering or the walls seemed to be melting. There they were, coming into the lab, Tosh, Mickey and Owen. Look like that. Easy. Here we go!

He blinked away the last after-images, lifted his hands to examine them, and then tugged his pants out to sneak a peek in his boxers. Everything back to proper size!

"Excellent work, Tosh," he congratulated her. "We're all adults again."

"I'm Owen," Tosh said.

"Well, shit," said Owen.

"...eh, close enough," Mickey said, and went to get himself a beer.


End file.
